


Clinging onto the swallow’s wings

by Orlha



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Walking Dead (Video Games), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-24 04:15:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6141176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orlha/pseuds/Orlha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zombies AU. It all started with one Avengers’ mission, one warhead and one apocalypse. Now they must learn the ways of the new world, learn to survive and accept that some deaths are inevitable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bucky/Steve/Skye

**Day 200. (Six Months, 2 weeks, 4 days.)**

“Capsicle, you can’t go,” Tony shook his head. “It’s chaos out there and you’re the only person who can fix this.”

“I have to.”

“Think about the people you are abandoning,” Tony said, refusing to back down one bit. “Think of all the civilians that live in the Tower. Think of all the people that can be saved. Think of the _literal_ beacon of hope you and tin-man are.”

“You don’t get it, do you? Stark?” Steve zipped his suit up and holstered his shield; beside him, Bucky was slinging a sniper rifle and submachine gun on his back holster, sliding pistols into the holsters by the sides of his thighs, then picked up the axe from the bed. Like Steve, he was armed to the teeth.

Bucky wasn’t going to add anything into the conversation. He was going to go, with or without Steve. He didn’t care if the world burnt down on him while he walked down, he didn’t care if people died because he left. In the past, he might have, but that man had been left in the canyon almost eighty years ago. The only reason why he had not left the tower in search for Daisy was because he promised Steve. Now he had fulfilled the promise. He had extracted all the scientists from the broken laboratories, carried them so where the brightest minds of the world could study the outbreak from the Tower itself and he was going to finish the one thing that had been driving him all this time.

“You asked if you’d lay down yourself on the wire once,” Tony yelled to the duo as they made their way across the room. Steve’s steps faltered and Bucky halted beside with a resigned look. “You asked me if I’d be the one that lay down myself on the wire,” Tony repeated as he approached them. “I said I’d cut it.”

“It’s not same, Stark.”

“Don’t _Stark_ me!” He stabbed a finger at Steve. “You asked me! You said think about the lives! Think about the people! That blood in you is the only thing that is keeping you, both of you from turning into one of _them_. I know you’ve been bitten, so don’t lie to me, Steve.”

“Stark,” Bucky moved between Steve and Tony, pushing the exhausted once-billionaire away. “It’s not the same.”

“It’s the same damn thing!” The veins stood flushed against his pale neck as he ran a trembling hand through his hair, dropping into the couch. “What if you don’t come back? Then what? How are we going to cure the outbreak without that serum?”

“Look.” Steve crouched beside him and laid a hand on Tony’s thigh. “No matter what you say, Bucky and I are going back out there and resuming our search for Daisy. She’s our soulmate and you know we aren’t going to give up just because it’s been six months.”

“What if she’s changed?” Tony gripped where his soulmark was.

“She’s not.”

“You don’t know that for a fact,” Tony told him. “I still feel P-Pepper you know.”

Steve pulled himself up and walked towards the quinjet where Bucky was waiting for him. “We’ll be back, Tony.”

“Take Mark LXXXIII, it’s already in there anyway. Remember, if it get smashed out there-”

“Bring back the pieces. We remember Tony.” A familiar grin slid across Steve’s face. He watched Tony until the hatch was fully shut and the plane in the air before slipping into the seat beside Bucky, weaving his fingers with him. There were no words that either of them could express. Tony was right, after all. They hadn’t known Pepper had changed into one of _them_ until they came to extract her, brought her back to the Tower, just in case she could be cured. Steve didn’t know what he was going to do if Daisy had really been changed. He hoped that she wasn’t, that their bond was as strong as they remembered it to be, that he could tell from the state of bond itself.

He lifted his eyes to meet Bucky’s blue ones and swallowed tightly. “Bucky-”

“Don’t.” He peeled his hand from Steve’s and placed it on the wheel, clenching it.

“But, what if.”

“She’s Quake, Steve. Did you forget that it?” Steve leaned against the chair, letting Bucky’s voice wash over him. “She doesn’t even _need_ to let _them_ come close to her before blasting them away. If it’s anyone to make it through, it’d be her.”

“She’d be make it through,” Bucky repeated it, though it was less to the super soldier beside him and more to himself.

\----

**Day 245. (Eight Months, 2 days.)**

“You think the damn fucking plane would be a beacon enough,” Bucky roared, swinging the axe across one of _their_ heads. “You think the bond itself was enough to pinpoint where she was.” He swung the axe again, splintering the axe against another zombie. “Two fucking months and we still haven’t see hide or hair of our best girl.”

Steve shook the remnants off his shield, searching the forest for something. It had to be here. They had gone around the whole forest, all of the northern Canadian forests and led them right back to the same forest.

What had they missed?

The rocks, the boulders. Everything looked the same as it was, as it should be. Were they hiding? Was… she one of them? “Bucky-”

“You’re supposed to be the hopeless optimist, Steve.” His lips twisted and he pulled Steve towards him by his lapels. “You’re the one who is supposed to keep preserving. Telling me - Bucky! She’s still out there! She’s still alive!”

Anger rolled off his soulmate, justified anger. Steve understood. It was eight months. No matter how good she was, not one of the bunkers, bases, home-grown safehouses had survived past three. The only other way to have survived this would have been to keep moving but she hadn’t. The tendril of their bond had led them to the exact same place each time. If there wasn’t a base here, then she had to be changed. Had their bond survived the change because they were super soldiers? Tony’s hadn’t and neither did Carter’s. The virus had spread through their system, almost changing them too, had it not been for his blood.

Bucky released him, dropping him like he was filth. “I’m not giving up.” He swivelled around, waving his axe back and forth the undergrowth. “We’ve already eliminated all the zombies here anyway. So it’s not like we can’t stay here for a prolonged period. Search through every damn-”

Then the floor beneath them rumbled. Earth crumbled away and Bucky jumped away from where the crevice was widening.

“So all this damn time, we just needed to clear the zombies?”

Daisy was at the hangar waiting for them as them walked in, flinging her arms around both of them. “I’m so sorry. I tried- We-”

“It’s okay,” Steve soothed her, trying to ease the violent trembling in her body. She was so thin, so pale, almost like a ghost of what he once remembered her to be. The memories were unfair. He remembered her to be that woman back before _they_ happened. A lot of things changed between then and now. “You should have just let us know that you needed the zombies cleared like two months ago when we came by.”

“It-It’s not that.”

Something was wrong. Yes, Steve knew she might not be fully okay when he finally found her, but not like this. She stumbled over her words, trembled so much that he and Bucky had laid a hand on her back to support her.

“Tell us, Doll,” Bucky said.

“Cou-Coulson. He changed. I had to- had to-” She let off a wave of vibration just as another rush of zombies made for them, a  rush of zombies from within the bunker. Oh God, had she been living with them for the last two months?

Clearly just that shot of vibration had taken a toll on her and she stumbled over her legs almost falling flat onto the floor before Steve grabbed her and slung her across his arms. “Tell us what you need, doll.” He pushed a curl from her face and pressed a lingering kiss on her forehead. “We can help you.”

“Je-Jemma. Fitz.”

“We got it.”

Bucky unhooked the axe from his pack while Steve tied Daisy to his back despite her protests and slid the shield onto his arm. “We just need you to direct us, okay?” he said gently to her. She laid her head on the crook of the neck as she nodded.


	2. Tony/Pepper - Beginning of the end

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony would have ever expected that everything would be different in just four hours.
> 
> It was spring and he was due for a vacation in the Bahamas with Pepper. It was forecast to have perfect weather all through the week, hell, he even told Steve to take him off rotation for the whole week. Just two days more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I debated this, not sure if I want Darcy to be soulmates with Bruce or who... I'm actually still not sure. I couldn't see her with Rhodey.. or Sharon... Maybe Sam, kinda flipped a coin for this.. XD If anyone wants me to change, then let me know! 
> 
> Next chapter is Nat/Clint. Till next month. ;)

**Day 0.**

Tony would have ever expected that everything would be different in just four hours.

It was spring and he was due for a vacation in the Bahamas with Pepper. It was forecast to have perfect weather all through the week, hell, he even told Steve to take him off rotation for the whole week. Just two days more.

He toyed with the small velvet box, opening and snapping it shut, unable to keep the silly grin off his face.

“If you look at it any longer, it’s going to spontaneously combust it,” Darcy said, looking up from her notes.

“My. Spontaneously combust, DD? We might just make a scientist out of you if you keep this up.”

She rolled her eyes and stretched from her cramped position in front of the computer. Tony could not help but follow her curves with his eyes. The silly grin morphing to a lewd grin though it was less of _her_ curves but more of the idea of how Pepper would look in that same position.

“Stop staring or else Brucie might have something to say,” she teased.

The said scientist looked up at the mention of his name and gave Tony a mock frown, “Tony, stop leering at my soulmate.”

He rolled his eyes and pocketed the box, starting to open his mouth when his words were cut off by the shrill alarm and a loud beeping from their Avengers cards. Tony groaned loudly, pulling the box out of his pocket and into one of his drawers. “You think the villains could just take a week off!” He muttered, fingers swiping across the data pack that arrived with the briefing.

It was simple enough. The villains - AIM and he was _so_ not surprised, had found a way of mechanising a bioweapon. A warhead that was ready for use. Of course Shield couldn’t have informed them when it was in the process of being made, they had to wait until everything was critical and then call the Avengers in with the ‘ _Oops we screwed up, now we need you to fix it for us’_ excuse. Tony was so fucking sick of the incompetence of Shield.

He was in his bedroom, stripping to his boxers as one of the drones brought his inner armor that he wore under the suit when Pepper called. Tony wasn’t surprised that she knew, Jarvis probably kept her abreast of all Avengers movements if possible.

“Pepper?” He said as her face appeared. “It’s a simple mission,” he rolled his eyes, tugging the zipper up. “Stupid Shield couldn’t keep their incompetence from calling us until it was too late as always.”

She chuckled, not really bothering to defend Shield despite of her close friendship with Coulson. Tony grinned at her and wagged his eyebrows at her. “Two days more before Bahamas, excited? Because I’m really excited to get to see you in that new bikini you bought. One glorious week of rolling in the sand. I’m thinking I should buy stock in some sunblock company. We’re going to need a lot of sunblock. What do you think?”

“Tony, you _already_ have a skincare division in Stark Industries. You don’t need to buy a sunblock company.” Pepper sighed and turned to someone off camera. “I have to get back to the meeting. Stay safe and call me when you get back.”

Tony mock saluted her, “Ma’am, yes Ma’am!”

\----

The warhead wasn’t what Tony had expected. It wasn’t anything _anyone_ expected. Tony had expected to defuse a warhead, a warhead with the whatever biohazard thing, inside the warhead. AIM for all their incompetence, like Shield, hadn’t generally gotten the hang of actually succeeding in their evil endeavours. Their failure rates were mostly contributed largely by the fact that he and the rest of the Avengers (mostly him) had hindered them and his genius had often stopped whatever they had created.

But this. Oh no. This was much worse.

“Guys?” Tony said, five minutes after staring down at the warhead and the initial scans that Jarvis had down. “Oh, I think we’re very fucked.”

The comms had fallen silent at his words. Not because he had just swore in front of Steve, but because for all the seven years that they had been working with him, there had never been once (okay, there was that one time in Alaska) that Tony had admitted in not being able to do whatever he was required.

“Is this the ‘ _We’re fucked because this is too easy and I’m all disappointed_ ’ or the Alaska kind of fucked?” Barton asked after a heartbeat’s beat.

Tony stared at the secondary round of scans, hoping against hope that Jarvis initial scans were faulty. The infrastructure was the same and if the chemical content was correct, the slightest vibration would set the entire thing off. AIM hadn’t intended to set the warhead off, the warhead wasn’t intended to be sent into some urban area, it was deliberately placed for _them_ to set it off. It would have spread rapidly via air and there would be no stopping it.

He could feel the rise of heat on the back of his neck as he tried desperately to figure a way of containing it.

“I think this is several times Alaska.”

Tony could hear the birds screeching in the distance as he flipped the face plate up, relieving himself of the suit. Not a word was said on the comms. There was nothing to be said. The rest of the Avengers had taken down what was left of the AIM guards. There had been no scientists among them, no one that seemed to know what they were guarding. The Black Widow had used her interrogation methods on them with no results. It was safe to say that the guards were merely sacrificial lambs.

They could circle back and attempt to hunt down the real AIM scientists, but there was fifteen minutes on the countdown, no matter how efficient Katniss and Spy Barbie was, there was no way they could accomplish that in under fifteen minutes.

Rhodey had arrived a moment later with Bruce at his request and the two scientists stood there trying to figure the warhead out.

“We can’t transport it for further testing, not with the casing being vibration-sensitive,” Tony told Bruce. “The preliminary scans indicate a new strain of the cold variant.” He drew his hands apart, enlarging the 3-D holographic cellular scan and pointed at the DNA strands. “You know this better than I do.”

Bruce stared at it. “Oh this is far more than Alaska. This is like that time when the new planet appeared in our atmosphere.”

Tony scoffed. “That time wasn’t _that_ bad.”

“Says you. I spent many weeks on that planet as the Hulk. It wasn’t very enjoyable.”

“Touché.”

“If it’s vibration sensitive, we could request Quake,” Steve butted in before the two scientists could begin a squabble, not that they would, but Capsicle seemed to think that he was incapable of maturity. They didn’t need Bruce turning green on top of a warhead that seemed to scare even Bruce.

“Quake’s in Ontario. We’re in Indonesia,” Tony deadpanned. “It’d take her at least three hours even in my suit and we don’t have that kind of time.”

He had spent next few minutes devising any possible way of defusing the damn bomb here and then another few minutes with Jarvis trying to figure if any of them could transport it to a safe site. That was until Bruce confirmed that the strain the the bomb could and would drastically alter any human’s DNA.  His head was throbbing viciously at the mass of calculations he had been doing. Sure he was used to working for long periods of time, working on ingenious ideas, but this was life and death.

He sighed, wishing he was back in his lab with all the machinery he could use to decipher this conundrum. Not a moment after he sighed, the timer hit the last three minutes.

“Well, fuck.”

Well three minutes wasn’t long enough. If he made a hole… Tony suited up, turning to Bruce. “Bruce. Turn into Hulk and bury this fucker. There’s no other way.”

The Avengers had already been in the Quinjet when the time had hit five minutes. There weren’t any fighting for them to do. Tony could see the restlessness in them as he approached the Quinjet. Hulk should be immune to whatever that would explode, the rest of the Avengers weren’t likely.

The ramp door drew close behind him the moment Tony stepped onto the Quinjet, Barton and Natasha pushed the thrusters as fast as they could. Shield had evacuated all the neighbouring towns and by Jarvis’ calculations, anything from 180 miles to 500 miles would be susceptible to this virus. Tony ran the calculations again, returning the same result. The virus would drastically alter any human’s DNA. God knows why AIM had even designed such a weapon. Not unless they had planned to destroy every single human on earth.

Were the Inhumans vulnerable to this?

The stray thought fluttered across his mind and Tony shook his head, trying to focus at the issue at hand. He was missing something crucial. There was nothing AIM would have gained from creating a device that wiped out all human lifeforms… or was there?

He looked up, seeing the fear in Clint’s face as he glanced at him. “This virus that’s in the warhead,” Tony started. They hadn’t badgered him for answers, trusting him to resolve it. And now that he had failed, it was only right to tell them the full problem.

It was going to be a long night but Tony had no idea that it was only the beginning of the end. The beginning that changed the history of mankind.

\----

**Day 247. (Eight Months, 4 days.)**

Tony stared at the glass cell where Pepper paced back and forth. At least with the arc reactor powering the building, he didn’t need to worry about having enough electricity to cool the rooms. The glass cell was cold enough to preserve Pepper’s body, to keep her alive until Bruce could find a way to reverse its effects.

Taking a shallow breath, he palmed the glass cell. Pepper stood at the corner, staring blankly at the wall.

“I’ll fix this Peps,” he said. His warm breath frosting the cold glass. “I’ll fix you, this. Then we’re going to Bahamas like we planned to, yea?” He pressed his forehead against the glass, his voice dropping an octave. “Then I’ll ask you to marry me finally. In that restaurant that you loved.”

“Tony,” Bruce called out from behind. “Steve and Bucky are back.”

He lifted his head, tilting his face to the other scientist. “Did they bring her back?”

Bruce nodded but his face was far from happy. “She’s not doing very good.”

“Infected?”

He pursed his lips, taking his glasses off and rubbing it slowly with the corner of his shirt. “That’s the problem. She’s like Natasha too.”

“Well, fuck.”

**Author's Note:**

> I’ll eventually write the rest of the cast’s story in different chapters. Tony/Pep, Nat/Clint, Bruce/Darcy, Jane/Thor, Sharon/Rhodey, Sam/Wanda.


End file.
